Ernest has been married to Judy since 1973; they have five children and 11 grandchildren. Ernest believes strongly in the Boy Scouts of America; he's a former Scoutmaster and both his sons are Eagle Scouts.

Trying to silence the opposition (Take that, First Amendment!!), Al Gore and friends keep claiming that scientific consensus supports them on man-caused global warming. They push the media to proclaim that "the debate is over", so dissenting voices must be ignored.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction.

What about the claims of Al Gore and the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that 2,000-2,500 top scientists support their position? The UN group won't even release their names! Says Solomon:

I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. "The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world," the IPCC Secretariat responded. "The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be on-line in the second half of 2007." . . . Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused.